LOS ANGELES — The actors who played drinking buddies on the hit series "Cheers" have reached a settlement in a dispute with the studio that tried to market them as chatty barroom robots, lawyers for both sides said Monday.
The actors who portrayed Norm and Cliff in the television sitcom have settled a lawsuit against Paramount Pictures, which licensed theme bars in airports to install life-sized robots modeled after the pair without their permission.
George Wendt, who played the amiable and beer-loving Norm, and John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff, the postman and self-styled barroom scholar, first sued Paramount in 1993 in a case that bounced through the federal court system before being denied a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court last year.
That action let stand a ruling by a U.S. appeals court in California that had re-instated the lawsuit.